Background
Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945. Her mother was a legal secretary and her father a chemical technician.
Weequahic High School
Syracuse University
Parsons School of Design
Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945. Her mother was a legal secretary and her father a chemical technician.
An only child, Kruger attended Weequahic High School in Newark, and enjoyed what was by all accounts a typical middle-class upbringing. She was accepted to Syracuse University as an undergraduate, where she enrolled in a number of art and design classes. After only one year at Syracuse, Kruger moved to New York City to take more advanced art and design classes at the Parsons School of Design.
While enrolled at Parsons, Kruger's instructors included the American photographer Diane Arbus and graphic designer Marvin Israel. Israel in particular had a dramatic influence on Kruger, encouraging her to prepare a professional portfolio when she was becoming disenchanted with art school. At this early stage in Kruger's training, she had yet to assimilate mass media imagery, language, and signage into her work, and instead focused largely on architectural photography, painting, craft, and erotic imagery.
Upon leaving Parsons, Kruger found work as a designer and editor with a number of publications based in New York, including House and Garden, Aperture, and then Mademoiselle, becoming lead designer within a year of being hired and at the age of twenty-two. Despite her early success in editorial work, she felt compelled to pursue a career in art, having said she basically wasn't cut out for design work because she had difficulty in supplying someone else's image of perfection. In 1973, Kruger received her first big break, when curator Marcia Tucker, who would eventually found the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, selected several of Kruger's works for the Whitney Biennial exhibit.
During the late 1970s, while living and teaching in Berkeley, California, Kruger developed an interest in the written word - poetry in particular - and began writing and performing her own poetry and narratives, while still pursuing painting. The pull of language proved too much, and Kruger stopped painting and went back to her initial interest in photographs and words. This fascination led to explorations of physical space and boundaries, manifested most notably in her 1978 self-published "Pictures/Readings." The book included photographs of building exteriors accompanied by a narrative text on the opposite page in the form of a dialogue, dilemma, or dramatic scene. Kruger's unique juxtapositions of image and text, allowing each one to inform the other however concretely or abstractly, would become the foundation of her mature, conceptualist body of work.
Shortly after publishing "Pictures/Readings", Kruger completed a similar photographic study of hospitals, only this time the accompanying text was far shorter and more declarative, including phrases like "Go away" and "Not that." This motif of image and text in her work would soon mature into phrases that explored issues of social power dynamics, technology, death, violence, and the human condition, often taking the form of abstract concepts and postulations, i.e. "The illumination of the physical" and "The comfort construct." A crucial change in her work also took place during the late 1970s, as Kruger decided to abandon original photography in favor of found images, most often derived from mass media sources like magazines and newspapers.
By the early 1980s Kruger became more ambitious in both her use of rhetoric and imagery. Kruger would later claim that her chosen motif of overlaying pictures and words was due to their "ability to determine who we are and who we aren't." Indeed, with slogans like "I shop, therefore I am" and "Your body is a battleground," Kruger was exploring text that addressed issues of feminism, consumerism, desire, and personal autonomy. Her use of a reduced red, white, and black palette and clear typography is influenced by the aesthetics of the Russian Constructivists, in particular Alexander Rodchenko.
Another significant shift in Kruger's career took place in 1991 with her self-titled solo exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in New York in which she transitioned to immersive installations, covering nearly every inch of the gallery's interior with text accompanied by images, effectively transforming a white-cube gallery into a red, white, and black "arena of hostility." Of note, Kruger was the first female artist signed to the blue-chip Mary Boone Gallery, in 1988, which was best known at the time for representing macho, Neo-Expressionist male artists. The 1990s also marked for Kruger a return to magazine design, creating covers for publications like The New Republic, Ms., Newsweek, and Esquire, among others. Using her work within an entirely commercial medium carried with it a sense of irony, as much of her text can be seen as a direct challenge to consumerist culture.
Within the last two decades Kruger's oeuvre also expanded, quite literally, to include large-scale installations for museums and public spaces around the world. One such example was the landscape architecture piece "Picture This" (1995) for the sculpture park at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She maintains her criticality of contemporary life, still asking viewers to re-consider their contexts. Kruger has taught at California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of California, Berkeley, and is currently a member of the faculty at University of California, Los Angeles. She has also written a number of critical essays and reviews for publications like The New York Times, Artforum, and The Village Voice. In 2005 Kruger participated in The Experience of Art, the 51st Venice Biennale - the first Biennale curated by two women. The artist splits her time between New York City and Los Angeles.
Untitled (Your Moments of Joy Have)
Untitled (Buy Me)
Untitled (Thinking of You)
Untitled (I shop therefore I am)
Untitled (Your seeing is believing)
Untitled (Questions)
Untitled (Girl, Don't Die for Love)
Untitled (We don't need another hero)
Untitled (Not cruel enough)
Untitled (You Construct Intricate Rituals)
Untitled (You are seduced)
Untitled (Worth Every Penny)
Untitled (Not stupid enough)
Untitled (Who is bought and sold?)
Untitled (You are a very special person)
Untitled (Chessboard)
Face It (Green)
Untitled (Memory is your image of perfection)
Untitled (Super rich)
Untitled (Money Makes Money)
Untitled (Money can buy you love)
Untitled (your body is a battleground)
Kruger dissects contemporary culture in her unique combinations of image and text, often targeting multiple oppressions or hypocrisies. Associated with postmodern Feminist art as well as Conceptual art, Kruger combines tactics like appropriation with her characteristic wit and direct commentary in order to communicate with the viewer and encourage the interrogation of contemporary circumstances.
The economy of Kruger's use of image and text facilitates a direct communication with the viewer. Within a short declarative statement, she synthesizes a critique about society, the economy, politics, gender, and culture. Kruger merges the slick facade of graphic design with unexpected phrases in order to catch the viewer's attention using the language of contemporary publications, grapic design, or magazines. Rather than attempting to sell a product, her works aim to sell an idea to the viewer that is meant to instigate a reconsideration of one's immediate context.
Quotations:
"I have no complaints, except for the world."
"Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in."
"Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways."
"Perhaps the problem is one of implicitness, that what is needed is, again, an alteration, not only called 'from primary to secondary', but from implicit to explicit, from inference to declaration."
"I'm fascinated with the difference between supposedly private and supposedly public and I try to engage the issue of what it means to live in a society that's seemingly shock-proof, yet still is compelled to exercise secrecy."